“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(The photograph of me, taken and dated by my father [Robert Sr.], has been kept in one of the Butts family albums for 53 years. In it the time is June 1, 1921. I’m almost 2 years old. I have curly light-colored hair. I wear a one-piece suit, long white stockings, and black shoes. I stand in the side yard of the house my parents rented in Mansfield, a small college town in northeastern Pennsylvania. Perhaps a dozen chicks cluster in the grass at my feet while I stare down at them, quite entranced. In blurred focus behind me an unknown teen-age girl sits on a swing that’s suspended from a tree limb, and an empty wicker stroller-type carriage [mine?] stands beside her. Parked in a driveway in back of her is a four-door touring car with a fabric top. I might add that Mansfield is only 35 miles below Elmira, N.Y., where Jane and I live now.

Ruburt’s mother knew that the child could be taken away were it proven that she was an unfit mother in any way, or unable to give the child proper care. Well over a year before this picture was taken, in fact, Ruburt was sent to a Catholic home.⁵ There, unconventional thought was not tolerated. The inflexibility of dogma conscientiously applied to daily action was experienced, and within it Ruburt tried to apply himself and to focus his deeply mystical nature.*

(11:05.) He had you to consider. This experience of his was taking time from your art as well as his own, to his way of thinking. At the same time, the mystical nature rejoiced at its opportunity, and sensed its potential. Ruburt was determined to go ahead (louder) — he was also determined to keep the old structures and to ignore the cracks in them. In part his loyalty to you was connected, and his responsibility as he saw it to keep you focused as an artist, and to let nothing distract you. Yet here he was distracting you.

The symptoms also served to focus that fantastic energy, while he figured out how it should be used. He could not accept a new psychic framework while within it there were questions concerning your joint ideas of business, and divided loyalties about writing and painting; your personal fears, jointly, about spontaneity in general, and the need to protect your talents both from your own sexual natures and the distractions of others.

[...] He cannot turn himself or his abilities off … His activities would be strong in whatever level of activity he focused his energy, exaggerated in terms of others by comparison. [...]